18 Questions With...
Chiara Bastoni

Greek tragedy, folk music, and performance art!

I would say waking up with someone I love, preparing a great breakfast, and spontaneously deciding to do something fun, silly, or playful. In general, a perfect day is one where I laugh a lot, feel love, and things fall into place.

Hm… it depends on what you mean by “taking being an artist seriously.” If you mean “making a living out of it,” I don’t think I even want to start. I just try to do what I like and experiment, following the direction of what feels important to me. But I do think that, to some extent, being an artist is about choosing what you want to live by, or what you give importance to. In that sense, I’ve always felt driven by expression and a certain search for truth, or essence.

For sure I started digging deeper into what I’m trying to say about a year and a half ago. Photography will always stay with me, but I also feel called to explore other media and expand my practice in many directions. I’m just at the beginning.

I’ll speak to what motivates me curatorially: Working with others, convening, discovering art I find relevant and bringing it together in new, unexpected contexts, hoping it reaches others intensely. Or the impulse to create something I haven’t been able to find yet. Something strong, out of the ordinary, that can shake us, make us feel liberated from conditioning, empowered to resist, to fight, to be awake. I think this last point is very important: creating spaces where we feel truly alive and in touch with who we are.

Through photography, I’d say it’s about contemplating the metaphors and connections that arise from the world. Everything can speak to everything else, and each subject speaks to something different. In general terms, there’s an underlying idea of unity and connectedness - but not in a rainbow-like sense, not blind to the “violence” of the world. Rather, through it, being able to appreciate life. My photos can be pretty sullen at times, but I still hope to convey recognition with these objects and structures I resonate with. I try to convey their realness, their essence.

I tend to focus on the same kinds of subjects wherever I go, as a way to find similarities in differences and vice versa. One of the points, I guess, is that - individually or collectively - we can choose to see through each other, transcend our limits, and accept each other despite pain and difference. Through my practice I exercise.

Through video, I don’t really know yet. It’s a medium I’m just beginning to approach. I see it as a way to expand this - with more intensity, movement, energy, and emotion.

Through curation, if we include it as an artistic practice, I hope to help others reach something within themselves, gain perspective, and re-contextualize their relationship to the world. It really depends on whom I work with.

It’s hard to talk about “documenting” in relation to how I approach creation. Curatorially, I like to respond to the real needs of the place, community, or audience I’m addressing. I try to bring new perspectives to relevant issues - emotionally, though. Never by directly talking about the topic, but by tackling it transversally and viscerally. That’s my intention, at least.

Photographically, I can name the themes I see in my work: time and impermanence, belonging, inadequacy at times, resistance at others, unity, irony… but in the end, who knows how it reaches others. I don't want to impose a line of interpretation. Anything is welcome from the other side.

I’m currently in a long-term artistic-curatorial project I very much dreamt of. I dream of continuing to search for ways to bring depth back to the artistic experience on a curatorial level, and of applying that to create beauty and powerful work. Too often what I encounter feels like a product, or like nothing compared to what art should be, in my opinion. I want to create things outside those mechanisms. I don’t know - maybe it’s utopic, but it’s one utopia I want to believe in.

Banal probably, a notebook and a pen.

I don’t have a studio, but I really listen to everything - or at least everything that’s known to me. My music taste is very varied. If it’s good, I don’t discriminate.

Ahh. Definitely seeing artists and art as separate from life - putting artists on a pedestal as if they weren’t really human. I think this creates a big problem. Art comes from life and is part of life. If you separate it, you miss the whole point.

I adore Arken and Louisiana in Copenhagen. I love the idea of a museum trip outside the city center—it adds more intentionality. Outside institutional spaces, Ungdomsøen Island is pretty cool (KUNE ❤️), and really anywhere people can feel free and liberated. But it’s complicated to use these spaces meaningfully—I don’t want to make it sound so easy.

I got myself a pair of black leather décolleté heels. Not sure I’ll ever use them.

That’s a funny word. I think white tea. (Tea counts as a libation, doesn’t it?)

The Art of Joy by Goliarda Sapienza.

I'll say Rome. But I love Berlin too. And Cairo.

In general I do. Of course, if the surprise is a flood in my apartment - no jinxing - I might revisit my answer.

Cooking always brings me back into the world.

At this moment I’m testing out many new things, which makes me a beginner at pretty much everything. But there’s always a dimension of working with others in a way that brings out the best in both their work and mine. And in relation to photography, combining writing and visual work to express more, slowly adding more and more of myself, without becoming literal. Hiding less, being more vulnerable. It takes quite some courage, it's a journey.